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U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books
eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."
So how many books cover functional programming?
Ride the skies
We've been pushing to go from Paper to Digital. It's interesting that they're going in the opposite direction here. The article has no mention of the Kindle. I find it hard to believe that the Kindle doesn't play some big role in this. Perhaps they will offer these books for free on the Kindle to help push the device? Personally, I think they should be online and free.
So Amazon is going to be so nice as to offer us the chance to PURCHASE what actually belongs in the public domain? Wow. I am impressed and excited.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that? Could they sue me for copying their scanned version? Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
They can't sell reprints unless they are public domain. How many people who published works before 1929 are still alive?
This space available.
They can't sell reprints unless they are public domain. How many people who published works before 1929 are still alive?
Not all of these books are in the public domain. While I do not have a list of them, the article said only some of them are in the public domain. There are plenty of non-public domain books that are no longer in print and difficult if not impossible to get a hold of even if you have money to pay for them. That was why Google paid the Authors Guild and publishers $125 million (see the article I linked that is related to this story).
My work here is dung.
That's why you need to read these books ;)
Every one.
This has already been done. There are several websites which do the same thing - reprint public domain content on the fly:
http://bibliolife.com/
http://www.kessinger.net/
http://www.publicdomainreprints.org
Interesting enough, BiblioLife was founded by the same people who founded BookSurge.
and subsequently delete them.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
The law makes DRM-cracking illegal. Does that mean that publishers can slap DRM on a public domain book (lapsed copyright or otherwise), and thereby for all practical purposes extend the copyright?
I suppose since Amazon and Google are taking the time to scan, clean up, edit, typeset, and republish these books, they should feel free to sell them like they'd sell it like any publisher can with other public domain works. The fact that the books are rare doesn't change the situation legally. If someone wanted to buy the restored Amazon/Google reprint of a rare public domain book, scan it, run it through OCR, remove the formatting, and give it away for free, they could. If someone else then took that text and printed it out into a book and sold it, they could do that too.
Why do they need to enter into an agreement with anybody to publish (in print or digitally) books in the public domain?
Because Amazon doesn't have the books and presumably the U of Michigan library doesn't want to be in the business of reproducing (either physically or electronically) the books that they have on their shelves.
Just because you happen to have a rare out of print book on shelf in your living room doesn't entitle me to come barging in your front door with my photocopier or scanner to make myself a copy, nor does it obligate you to hand out copies to everybody who walks by. However, we could enter into an agreement where you let me come into your living room at a convenient time and make a copy of your rare out of print book at my own expense. We could not legally enter into that agreement regarding the latest bestseller that you picked bought yesterday because copyright law prohibits me from copying it and you from inviting me in to copy it.
Other companies have been in the facsimile/reprint business for a while. The best known (at least in the U.S.) is probably Dover Press, but there are others. What makes it interesting is that this is Amazon doing the publishing, meaning that there will be an order of magnitude more titles available than what places like Dover can manage.
My partner has ordered a few facsimile reprints of 17th century theological and philosophical works from Kessinger Publishing, works she wasn't able to get anywhere else. They're just poor facsimiles, almost photocopies, of old works, but even then manage to work in a little incompetence. Their printing of Sir Kenelm Digby's Of Bodies and of Man's Soul to Discover the Immortality of Reasonable Souls has on its cover (and as the title on the Amazon page!) one of the best editorial screw-ups ever.
This is not a problem of old==good and new==bad. Start from the assumption that 95% of everything is crap. 95% of the books that were written 400 years ago were crap. However, only the good ones have survived. This gives the impression that older stuff is better, but this is a mistaken impression.
On the other hand, much of the good and valuable stuff from the past is very hard to get ahold of. There are people that would really love to have a copy of Addington's guide to illustrating flaked stone artifacts, but they are difficult to find, as the book has been out of print for years (and is not into the public domain to boot), and those of us that own copies of the book are not likely to give them up. If Amazon wants to get the rights to the book and print off copies on demand, I would be happy to pay them for the service. As I see it, Amazon is attempting to fill a niche. Sure, they make money off of it, but I don't see it as a simple marketing ploy designed to capitalize off of nostalgia for the past.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that?
yes
Under what law in what jurisdiction? In the United States, Bridgeman v. Corel excludes photocopies of an uncopyrighted work from copyright because they lack originality.
I was involved a few years ago with a rather stupid lawsuit where a publisher got ahold of a database containing tens of thousands of scanned pages of documents well into the public domain. (original documents were from the 17th and 18th century) They argued that they could publish the documents as they were in the public domain. The Owner of the scans argued that they were reproducing copyrighted work. The courts agreed with the owners of the original scans.
The United States has a 1991 Supreme Court case to the contrary: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service . Which country are you talking about?
Sometimes the CRAP here is amazing:
1. Google is scanning the books, which makes it much less likely they will be lost
2. Someone, probably Google, will index all the books, so we can find them, IN PRINT or not.
3. Amazon will print, on demand, at a very reasonable price,
Please, dip-shit, tell me what is wrong with that, you clearly have not waited for an "inter-lending library lending system" to find a copy of a book you want to read. It took >3 years to get the UK copyright libraries to produce AE van Volgt and Smith's Lensmen books, because they were fiction and thus "not serious".
Personally I can not wait for google to create a new "Library of Alexandria" within which we can download books for 0 or a micro-transaction fee.
Publishers begin to understand this, and typically, want to stop it, tough luck.
Finally I subscribe to a number of pay for view sites (eg LWN.NET) which offer excellent value. and I would certainly subscribe to a good book/indexing service, commercial or otherwise.